Román Leão

Tag: poetry

  • The Savage Detectives: A Novel—Roberto Bolaño

    The release of an English translation of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives went head-to-head with the appearance of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke for 2007’s literary news of the year.

    Lucky for us, Bolaño’s novel turned out to be every bit as great as the hype. Long known and respected by Latin American readers, Bolaño was a bit of mystery for most English monolinguists who, if hip to his writings at all, had to subsist on a few slim volumes published by New Directions.

    With the heavyweight house of Farrar, Straus and Giroux picking up the mantle and feature-length articles in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books touting the novel’s many charms, Bolaño was the toast of the literary world—four years after his death in Spain of liver failure.

    The Savage Detectives begins in a mid-1970s Mexico City where a young poet, Juan García Madero, is invited to join a mysterious fraternity of writers calling themselves “visceral realists.” To call the group a movement is a bit of a stretch as no one, García Madero especially, knows (or is willing to say) exactly what visceral realism is. This doesn’t stop the group’s leaders, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (a thin, thinly disguised Bolaño) from conducting purges that would make a Maoist nervous.

    The writers prowl the streets and back alleys of Mexico City, constantly writing, having sex, getting drunk, and ultimately running afoul of a killer pimp and his corrupt police buddies. As one does. Of course, this encapsulation does rough injustice to Bolaño’s kaleidoscope of richly drawn characters, some of which—like rare desert flowers—bloom once, fade, and are never seen again.

    The middle of the book picks up after the poets have returned from the desert where they had been searching for the mysterious poet who started the original visceral realism movement in the 1920s. For the next 400 pages, we see Lima and Belano through the eyes of people who cross paths with them in a 20-year span ending in 1996. This fractured faux-oral biography plays with the notion of identity while giving the disorienting, yet thrilling, feeling of looking at the pair through a many-faceted diamond.

    The final third returns to the Sonoran Desert to tell the story of what happened to Lima, Belano, García Madero, and wayward prostitute Lupe on their search for the elusive Cesárea Tinajero. To paraphrase García Madero: When it was all over, I felt like I knew every inch of that f’ing country. Even more, I felt I was born there.

    Picador

    Also by this author:
    The Insufferable Gaucho
    The Return
    The Romantic Dogs

  • The Message [poema]

    Tuesday morning the rain stops.
    Underneath the swinging bridge, the creek
    was awake all night and now

    runs rampant. Cross to the parlor where
    cool hands have built a roaring
    welcome. After endless summer days

    spent steeped in light, oak-bound heat
    is now released and supplants the gray.
    On the porch, the old men speak

    with tongues of fire, both spirited
    and holy. Inside, the wood
    relates the original story—

    an old celestial game of
    telephone. The message started out
    in violence—a roiling

    furnace burning since the sky began.
    Today, sitting by the hearth,
    the word has turned to love—and two hearts

    that were embers—are now suns.

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Asylum (Padrão dos Descobrimentos) [poema]

    Even as children, we suspected our world
    was broken—as if our hometown had been lifted
    and dropped from a much higher place.
    Everyday during the long summers we explored
    the edges of the pieces—the spots
    where the pattern no longer matched up.

    Thirty years later, it’s harder to get up
    the motivation to get out and map the world,
    to find the forgotten corners and secret spots.
    The veil of mystery has been lifted,
    and the edge of the continent explored.
    The great unknown now muffled by a sense of place.

    From Yerba Buena to Eureka, I thought I had found the place
    to put down roots—and as many times—I pulled them up.
    A privateer, up and down the coast I wandered,
    only to miss the hidden parts of the world.
    No longer lost, my spirits are still lifted
    when I think about those magic spots.

    Days spent in rapture until our eyes saw spots,
    we rode from place to place.
    As we grew, our dreams were lifted,
    until too soon—we just grew up.
    It’s every man’s destiny to make his way in the world,
    and every boy’s to forget the land he conquered.

    Down in the creeks and ravines we explored,
    searching for those perfect spots
    away from the bustle of the world.
    We were driven to find a mystic place,
    somewhere where the rules were not put up,
    and our pirate banner could be lifted.

    With found bits of lumber are battlements yet lifted
    into treetops no longer noticed or surveyed?
    The old men below don’t bother to look up,
    knowing that gazing into the sun pays nothing but blindness.
    With everything marked and in its proper place,
    wonder fades into the background of the world.

    If only the veil of maturity could be lifted up,
    and we could again see the world as an enchanted place.
    The places we knew as youth could provide asylum
    even for the grown.

    Published in The Hot Air Quarterly, Number Sixteen

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • The River [poema]

    The shattered granite banks of the Klamath
    have been rounded by time—more time
    than I can imagine, though I try—and water.
    If the steelhead would show and were
    in a talkative mood, they would tell me
    something about patience, although perhaps
    through their absence, they are still trying to teach.

    This, I have down. I could stand in this cold
    current all day, all year, forever; what
    else could be this perfect? As an eagle
    flies overhead and a pair of black bears
    roam the far shore; all I am missing are things
    that don’t matter, and you. Where are you?
    How could days be so sublime and disconsolate?

    I still have a lot to learn from this river.
    The sharp edges of where whole escarpments
    have sheared off from my heart have yet to be
    smoothed over. Landslides neither foreseen
    or witnessed, but devastating in their force, await
    the healing touch of water. Meanwhile, distant stars
    are my cold companions.

    Photo/Ray Larsen

  • Tears Are Saltwater [poema]

    The bridge is at a standstill

    Protestors cast their keys before them
       Over the steel railing
          Into the bystander Bay
             To be swallowed by sturgeon
                And checked over by crabs

    Imagine that chirping in the background
       The unexpected result
          Of deep-water exoskeletal investigations

    Halfway across the world atrocities continue unabated

    As Dungeness poke at newfound fobs
       As headlights flash on and off unconsidered
          And batteries slowly die
             Their future corroding away
                By the minute

    We wait, hoping for the slack tide to return

  • Spirit (for Etel Adnan) [poema]

    Spirit is a river
    rolling relentless
    through the night,
    through the dark.

    Sometimes (like the Rouge,
    like the Buffalo,
    like the Schuylkill,
    like the Cuyahoga),
    the river catches
    fire.

  • Poetry as Insurgent Art—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    If any man alive can be still held responsible for the Beat movement and/or the poetry renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, it is San Francisco poet and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was there from the very beginning, helping to create a scene in the Italian North Beach neighborhood that reverberated to this day.

    It was the publishing arm of City Lights that propelled East Coast writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, as well as San Franciscans like Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti himself, into the national spotlight. The landmark Howl obscenity trial, sparked after San Francisco police seized the City Lights paperback, won more notoriety for what Ginsburg and friends were up to than any lame spot-the-beatnik tours could have ever brought to bear.

    The bibliographical note to this slim volume, Ferlinghetti’s own Ars Poetica, marks it as an on-going work in progress starting as a KPFA broadcast in the late ’50s. The main body of Poetry as Insurgent Art reads almost like a collection of daily affirmations, ranging from practical advice to writers, “If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a ‘take your seat’ practice. Stand up and let them have it,” to more philosophical and sensual musings such as, “Be a dark barker before the tents of existence,” and “Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.”

    Some of Ferlinghetti’s aphorisms seem antithetical to a movement that worshiped the idea of Jack Kerouac spontaneously writing On the Road on a continuous roll of Teletype paper. Advice like, “Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought,” places him outside of the spur-of-the-moment crowd.

    Of course, Ferlinghetti always argued that he was never a “Beat,” but was rather a bohemian, sort of a proto-Beat, if you will. In her 2004 book, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, Laren Stover breaks down the evolution of bohemianism into five branches: Nouveau, Gypsy, Beat, Zen, and Dandy, any number and combination of which can still be found slouching around the City wherever hipsters congregate, leading to possibly my favorite of his bits of wisdom, “Stash your sell-phone and be here now.”

    The book veers into more abstract attempts to answer the burning question of What is Poetry? some of which bear the brand of the modern world, such as, “Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace.” ’Erm… why do I get the feeling that one may not make the cut in a future edition? Others are timeless, “It is private solitude made public,” psychedelic, “Poetry is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world,” religious, “It is the street talk of angels and devils—It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound,” and, last-but-not-least, political, “The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.”

    It takes him a while to get around to it, but toward the end of the book lies possibly the best definition of poetry I have ever read. “Poetry is making something out of nothing, and it can be about nothing and still mean something.”

    Ferlinghetti certainly knows what he’s talking about, and although the man is gone now, we’re truly lucky to still have his words around.

    New Directions